Sam Scarpino on Modeling Disease Transmission & Interventions

“We should not have a strategy that involves killing a sizable percentage of the population. But, even if you were going to get over that ethical hurdle, [herd immunity for Covid-19] still isn't going to work.”
- Sam Scarpino

For this special mini-series covering the Covid-19 pandemic, we will bring you into conversation with the scientists studying the bigger picture of this crisis, so you can learn their cutting-edge approaches and what sense they make of our evolving global situation.

This week we speak with Samuel V. Scarpino, who earned his PhD at UT Austin before becoming an Omidyar Fellow at The Santa Fe Institute, and now an Assistant Professor in the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. In this episode, we glance off the surface of his extensive epidemiological research to discuss the complexity of interacting biological and behavioral contagions, analyzing Chinese mobility data to evaluate pandemic interventions, and the problem of unequal data collection due to socioeconomic inequality.

Note that this episode was recorded on March 20th and we’d like to issue a blanket disclaimer that our understanding of the novel coronavirus pandemic evolves by the hour. We believe this information to be up to date at the time of publication but the findings discussed in this episode could soon be refined by more research.

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Read the papers we discuss in this episode at Sam’s Google Scholar Page.

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Podcast Theme Music by Mitch Mignano.

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